Donald Trump catapulted himself into the spotlight with his gilded real estate ventures and vibrant personality. The latter is what has made his show "The Apprentice" such a huge success. And over the years, he's had an opinion or two about the business world. "In the end, you're measured not by how much you undertake but by what you finally accomplish," Trump once said. But like any successful business person, Trump has had his share of setbacks. Here, we present to you 12 Trump businesses that went belly up or no longer exist.

Greece owes $320 billion to its creditors and cannot repay the loans. Like Greece, Medicare is also accumulating an unaffordable mountain of debt. And both Greece and Medicare are more likely to default on their debts than to adopt the highly unpopular reforms needed to pay them off. Wednesday's news from the Medicare Trustees may not seem that dire. The headline is comforting, but misleading. Medicare's Hospital Insurance (HI) trust fund-also known as Part A-will run short of money, but not until 2030. Starting that year, Part A benefits can be paid out only to the extent that money comes...

The future for the coal industry is looking “increasingly bleak,” according to an investor’s note from Macquarie Research. The analysis firm also said that “a wave of bankruptcies” appear to be just over the horizon as coal mining companies deal with mounting debt and a shrinking market. The coal markets have collapsed in spectacular fashion over the last few years due to a perfect storm of factors. U.S. coal producers first had to compete ferociously with shale gas in America’s electric power sector as fracking took off about a decade ago. That forced an array of coal plants to shut...

CHARLESTON, W.Va. Patriot Coal Corp. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Tuesday for the second time in three years. The company made the filing in U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. It had emerged from an earlier bankruptcy case in December 2013 in Missouri. Patriot said it is involved in active negotiations for the sale of its operating assets to a strategic partner. Patriot said it will continue shipping and mining operations and it has received a commitment for $100 million in debt financing from secured debt holders that it did not identify.

NEW YORK--Patriot Coal Corp. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Monday, the largest casualty of the worst U.S. market for the power-plant fuel in decades. U.S. demand for coal has slumped this year as utilities favored cheaper natural gas, as prices of that fuel hit decade lows amid a supply glut. Coal miners, including Patriot Coal, have slashed production and laid off workers in an effort to match supply to weakening demand. Coal accounted for 35% of U.S. electricity generation during the first four months of the year, according to the Energy Information Administration, down from 44% during the same...

Bidder offers just €10,000 for showpiece in Spanish bankruptcy auction. A Chinese company that was the only bidder for one of Spain's "ghost airports" wants to revive the site as a cargo hub for the Asian market. Ciudad Real airport, one of the most notorious emblems of Spain's economic crash, cost €1 billion (HK$8.4 billion) to build and was on sale at a knockdown price of €40 million. Tzaneen International was the sole bidder in the bankruptcy auction, however, and it offered just €10,000. The facilities of the deserted site, 160km south of Madrid, include a runway long enough to...

There has been so much attention on Greece in recent weeks, but the truth is that Greece represents only a very tiny fraction of an unprecedented global debt bomb which threatens to explode at any moment. As you are about to see, there are 24 nations that are currently facing a full-blown debt crisis, and there are 14 more that are rapidly heading toward one. Right now, the debt to GDP ratio for the entire planet is up to an all-time record high of 286 percent, and globally there is approximately 200 TRILLION dollars of debt on the books. That...

Rapper 50 Cent filed for bankruptcy on Monday. The news came as bit of a surprise since The New York Times just described him as a man of "exceptional business instincts" less than a week ago. In May, Forbes pegged his net worth at $155 million. 50 Cent, aka Curtis Jackson III, reportedly earned between $60 million and $100 million from a stake in Vitamin Water when it sold to Coca-Cola in 2007, according to The Washington Post. Yet in the abbreviated Chapter 11 filing Monday, Jackson's lawyers said that his assets range from $10 million to $50 million, including...

Rapper 50 Cent has filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Monday. "In court papers filed in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Hartford, Conn., Mr. Jackson reported assets and debts each in the range of $10 million to $50 million," reports the Wall Street Journal. The filing comes just three days after the "Get Rich or Die Tryin'" rapper was ordered to pay $5 million to a woman who sued him for posting a sex tape online. Previously, 50 Cent was recently reported to be worth around $270 million, largely thanks to his minority stake in Vitamin Water. In 2007, the...

<p>Jeb Bush apparently doesn’t want people to know that he worked at Lehman Brothers, the now-defunct investment bank whose collapse led to the broader financial meltdown in 2008.</p>
<p>That’s the only conclusion I can come to after receiving a series of occasionally bizarre emails from his press people to what I thought was a fairly simple question about Bush’s work before he became a Republican presidential candidate.</p>

Leading House Republicans declared their opposition Wednesday to allowing debt-ridden Puerto Rico access to Chapter 9 bankruptcy protections, raising new uncertainty about how the island can emerge from its financial crisis. A statement from House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte of Virginia said members of his committee share a concern that “to provide Puerto Rico’s municipalities access to chapter 9 of the Bankruptcy Code would not, by itself, solve Puerto Rico’s difficulties, which are associated with underlying, structural economic problems.” …

Puerto Rico has two very powerful allies in its debt drama: Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton. Both 2016 presidential candidates support giving Puerto Rico the same legal bankruptcy rights that states have. Puerto Rico's governor has been lobbying hard for the change to help deal with the commonwealth's $73 billion debt. There's a bill in Congress to give Puerto Rico what it wants, but it has no co-sponsors. That's why Bush and Clinton's backing could be key. "I think that Puerto Rico ought to be treated as other states are treated as it relates to restructuring," Bush said during a...

Greek voters’ decisive rejection of international creditors’ bailout terms adds to the pressure on foreign exporters already worried about getting paid for imports into Greece during the country’s capital controls. Some exporters have reduced the flow to Greece or insisted on payments upfront, while others keep up the imports into the country despite the increasing chance they won’t get paid. European pharmaceutical companies, for instance, are owed more than €1 billion for drugs and other goods already imported. snip Greece produces just 63% of the pork and 13% of the beef consumed in the country, according to government data. The...

Almost every option facing debt-drenched Greece is bad, but there is only one that will end this Greek tragedy for good. Let Greece go bankrupt. Then let this once-rich nation, hit the restart button to rebuild its economy. What I’m suggesting for Greece is what might be called the Detroit option. Put Greece under receivership and let these new authorities figure out how to manage the debt and decide who will take a haircut and how big. Pensioners, bondholders, welfare recipients, government workers, the International Monetary Fund, all will have to settle for less — maybe a lot less. It’s...

Remember this?Well congratulations! You are now! Except for one thing: after a few non-lethal union concessions, Detroit got the State to bail them and their pensions out. Greece just said “no” to the EU’s demand for concessions, so…this should be fun.Hard to believe isn’t it? The country that founded democracy has discovered how to destroy it. Well actually, Alexis de Tocqueville identified that mechanism a couple of centuries ago: “The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.” And we’ve been implementing it incrementally ever since: Detroit’s giant tire...

The debt crisis in Puerto Rico could potentially cost financial institutions in the United States tens of billions of dollars in losses. This week, Puerto Rico Governor Alejandro Garcia Padilla publicly announced that Puerto Ricoâ€™s 73 billion dollar debt is â€śnot payable,â€ť and a special adviser that was recently appointed to help straighten out the islandâ€™s finances said that it is â€śinsolventâ€ť and will totally run out of cash very shortly. At this point, Puerto Ricoâ€™s debt is approximately 15 times larger than the per capita median debt of the 50 U.S. states. Yes, the Greek debt crisis is larger,...

Its economy has been shrinking for years, its debts have been piling up for even longer, and its government has finally admitted that even brutal tax hikes and spending cuts wouldn't be enough for it to pay back everything it owes. I'm talking, of course, about Puerto Rico. Its governor, Alejandro García Padilla, admitted to the New York Times on Sunday that the island is going to have restructure its $72 billion in debt that is "not payable." Now, if it sounds like you've been hearing some variation of this story for years now, it's because you have—just about Greece....

Greek banks are preparing contingency plans for a possible “bail-in” of depositors amid fears the country is heading for financial collapse, bankers and businesspeople with knowledge of the measures said on Friday. The plans, which call for a “haircut” of at least 30 per cent on deposits above €8,000, sketch out an increasingly likely scenario for at least one bank, the sources said.

... The German chancellor’s disapproval helped end the political careers of former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi and Greek leader George Papandreou. After burning through whatever goodwill he had with Merkel’s lawmakers and the German public, the current Greek premier could be next.... “We are watching the end of the political career of Alexis Tsipras,” Jacob Kirkegaard, a senior fellow at Peterson Institute in Washington, said in a Bloomberg Radio interview. “Mr. Tsipras can continue his career on T-shirts for students, replacing Che Guevara.”... Refusing to play ball with Germany didn’t turn out well for Berlusconi, whose premiership had survived...

In the short term, the world runs on words; in the long term, the world runs on numbers. It is as though the Muses came to an agreement: In the here and now, mankind is subject to rhetoric, but mathematics gets the final say. In Athens, in San Juan, in Detroit, in Sacramento, in Springfield, and, soon enough, in Washington, Mathematics is arousing herself from her torpor, and she is cranky as hell. The long term is here. Greece has defaulted on its sovereign debt, and its banks have been shut down. Television viewers accustomed to watching a few odd...

Puerto Rico is bankrupt. The key problem is that while municipalities can declare bankruptcy, states and territories cannot. President Barack Obama recognizes the problem. “No federal bailout for Puerto Rico” is the White House’s position. Instead, he urges Congress to pass a bill allowing Puerto Rico to declare bankruptcy. The Associated Press gives details: “The White House threw cold water Monday on the notion of bailing out Puerto Rico from its financial crisis, instead urging Congress to consider changing the law so the island can declare bankruptcy. “On the heels of a dismal economic report, Puerto Rico’s governor has warned...

Greece joins Somalia, Sudan and Zimbabwe on the latest to be in debt to the International Monetary Fund. As Athenians rallied underneath thunderclouds to show their support for keeping Greece in the eurozone of single currency nations, their broke government defaulted on a $2.2-billion payment to the International Monetary Fund. At midnight on Tuesday, Greece joined Sudan, Somalia and Zimbabwe as countries in arrears to the IMF. Also at midnight, the bailout assistance package that began in February 2012 formally expired, leaving Greece without access to any emergency finances. In Washington, the IMF acknowledged that Greece had failed to meet...

The governor of Puerto Rico has admitted that it can't keep paying down the over $72 billion worth of public debt obligations. As a result, it finds itself in a uniquely awful position. It can't go into bankruptcy according to its own laws, so now it has to deal exclusively with its creditors to restructure its debt. That means it has to deal with Wall Street. "I think the surprise was that it happened this quickly," said Brian Kelly, CEO of Connecticut-based fund Brian Kelly Capital. "We thought it would take 6 months to a year... the solution is a...

Not all Californians believe that drought is the greatest threat to their state’s future. Early this month, a bipartisan group of current and former local officials filed the “Voter Empowerment Act of 2016,” a statewide ballot measure aimed at reforming the politics of public pensions. Its passage would forbid politicians in California from lavishing expensive retirement benefits on workers without explicit voter approval. The effort is being led by Carl DeMaio, a Republican former member of the San Diego city council, and Chuck Reed, a Democrat and former mayor of San Jose. If they prevail, the effects will be felt...

There is bad news to come regarding Social Security - not merely for the "1 percenters" but for ordinary Americans, who must either pay more to Social Security or receive less from it. Expanding Social Security, as some of members of Congress have proposed, isn't rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. It is like adding more passengers. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) recently released its latest financing projections for the Social Security program, showing a long-term funding shortfall that has more than quadrupled since 2008. The program's trust fund, which in 2008 the CBO projected would last until mid-century,...

Reacting to the disclosure that Hillary Clinton exclusively used a private email account during her tenure as secretary of state, a federal judge agreed Friday to reopen a conservative group's Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking details about the employment arrangements of top Clinton aide Huma Abedin. However, U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan declined — for now — to address claims from Judicial Watch that Clinton's use of the private account and server led State Department officials to commit a fraud on the court by certifying they had turned over all responsive records.

Either Greece’s banks will open on Monday and Christos Dranos’s butcher’s shop will still be in business. Or they won’t and his shop and the country’s ties to the Euro will be in serious peril.... Greece’s banks suffered a €4.2 billion ($5.8 billion) run last week ahead of an emergency European Union summit called for Monday in Brussels on the country’s deepening debt crisis and the continuing standoff between Athens and its foreign creditors.... A continuing rush for cash at ATM machines over the weekend suggests that panic has already set in. But beaches and coffee shops in Athens were...

Donald J. Trump, the billionaire real-estate mogul, on Tuesday will release a summary of assets that total about $9â€‚billion as part of his likely entry into the race for the Republican presidential nomination, according to people familiar with his plans. The two-page document Â— which will be published after he holds a political rally at Trump Tower in New York Â— will provide a valuation of his hotels and other properties. It will also show hundreds of millions in cash on hand and an outline of his debt, the people said. The details he will reveal Tuesday will provide one...

Gun maker Colt Defense LLC plans to file for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection by Monday, according to people familiar with the matter, amid business and accounting troubles. The company has secured financing to continue operating while in bankruptcy and expects to remain in business after the restructuring, the people said. The West Hartford, Conn.-based company, with a legacy dating to 17th century New England, developed a pistol it calls “the gun that won the West” and enjoyed a lucrative stretch in the late 1990s and early 2000s as the U.S. military’s sole supplier of the M4 line of firearms widely...

"From 1947 when [the] Bretton Woods System really got operating to 1971, when the dollar was convertible into gold at a 35th of an ounce, unemployment in America averaged 4.7 percent. And then we got rid of the Bretton Woods system — we defaulted on it — we went to fiat money, and in the years from 1971 to today, unemployment has averaged significantly above 6 percent. Low unemployment: gold standard. High unemployment: fiat money. But it’s not just unemployment. The bankruptcy rate which Elizabeth Warren likes to focus on was one point something per thousand for years, and suddenly...

American Eagle Energy became the fourth U.S. energy producer to file for bankruptcy protection in the aftermath of the big drop in crude oil prices. The Colorado-based company that buys and develops oil wells in the Bakken oil fields of North Dakota and Montana filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Monday in Denver’s bankruptcy court. American Eagle Energy, which recently missed an interest payment on its debt, listed assets of $222 million and liabilities of $215 million. Shares of American Eagle Energy traded for as much as $7.05 less than a year ago, reflecting the stunningly fast collapse of...

Chicago has a simple financial choice: Stay in frying pan or get in the fire. That in simple terms is what Moody's Investors Service said in a report today about the difficult options the Emanuel administration faces over the city's woefully underfunded pension funds. The city must cut spending and raise taxes now or the risks of becoming insolvent will grow, forcing even harsher decisions later. The credit rating agency offers a sobering reminder of what's at stake in the eight-page report, which focuses on the pensions problems. ... A CUT ABOVE JUNK. Moody's, typically the most conservative of the...

Proving it's not only small, private, liberal-arts colleges that are susceptible to financial distress, Louisiana State University (LSU) announced that it's in the midst of drawing up a financial exigency plan. Bloomberg News, which reported the development, called the plan "equivalent to a college bankruptcy" and noted that it would let LSU fire tenured faculty and restructure its finances. The Baton Rouge-based university with over 30,000 students is drafting the plan, in part, because the most recently proposed budgetary cuts by Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal threaten to severely impact the higher-education system in the state. The governor's plans would cut...

Racy lingerie retailer Frederick’s of Hollywood is seeking bankruptcy protection in federal court after closing all of its stores and switching to an online-only business, which it intends to sell to the highest bidder. The privately held company says competition, decreased mall foot traffic and onerous leases helped push it into a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing.

ROANOKE, VA (AP) -- Coal producer Xinergy Ltd. and more than two dozen subsidiaries have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Knoxville, Tennessee-based Xinergy filed a Chapter 11 petition last week in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Roanoke, Virginia. The petition lists zero to $50,000 in assets and about $100 million to $500 million in liabilities....

The stat comes from a new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research. It may be hard to believe that professional athletes, who earn so much money at such a young age, could possibly end up bankrupt. But nearly 16% of those in the National Football League do—just not right away. According to a new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), 15.7% of NFL players have filed for bankruptcy 12 years after they retired. The paper, entitled “Bankruptcy Rates Among NFL Players with Short-Lived Income Spikes,” examines the traditional model of consumption smoothing (save money...

General Motors Co will not have to face dozens of lawsuits accusing it of concealing an ignition-switch defect that has been blamed for more than 200 deaths and serious injuries, a U.S. bankruptcy judge ruled on Wednesday. Plaintiffs in the lawsuits said the company violated their constitutional rights by failing to disclose the defect, while GM had argued it was protected from claims on vehicles pre-dating its 2009 exit from Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The decision by U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Robert Gerber means GM may avoid potentially billions of dollars in liability, as well as the cost of defending those lawsuits,...

A plan to salvage RadioShack Corp’s RSHCQ.PK business by co-branding most of its 1,740 surviving stores with cellular phone provider Sprint Corp (S.N) earned U.S. bankruptcy court approval on Tuesday, ending four days of contested court hearings. The stores are what survived of more than 4,000 outlets after RadioShack went bankrupt in February. Founded in 1921, the chain was a go-to retailer for electronics before becoming increasingly irrelevant in the digital age. Judge Brendan Shannon, in Delaware bankruptcy court, approved a sale of the stores to the Standard General hedge fund, which plans to keep most of them open under...

The nation's largest chain of Christian retail stores has withdrawn its controversial bankruptcy plan, according to a court filing yesterday. The decision by Family Christian Stores (FCS) comes after dozens of Christian publishers sued the ministry over $20 million of consignment inventory, and both the US Trustee and creditors committee objected to how the sale plan would allegedly benefit one of FCS' owners.

To the outsider, CalPERS — the largest U.S. pension fund, created by California state law and run by an arm of the state of California — may seem like the champion of the working man, fighting for the rights of municipal employees and pensioners. But that perception may be undeserved, per the Chapter 9 bankruptcy of Stockton, Calif., where CalPERS sought to shift to taxpayers (an even larger and more sympathetic party than CalPERS) the financial burden to support what some consider CalPERS' outrageous costs. U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Klein openly opined, "CalPERS has bullied its way about in this...

Associated Wholesale Grocers plans to convert five of seven Dahl’s Foods stores in Iowa to the Price Chopper banner in early April and two others, in the Des Moines market, to a new, unspecified format, according to published reports. Kansas City, Kansas-based AWG acquired the stores in January following Dahl’s bankruptcy filing in November. Price Chopper is an AWG-licensed name used by 51 members in Kansas.

Is the Chicago pension system so messed up and union work rules so entrenched the only way to change either of them is bankruptcy? I think so. So does Dennis Byrne who wrote on his blog today Chicago's Only Salvation: A Detroit-Like Bankruptcy. This is a guest post from Byrne. Chicago's Only Salvation: A Detroit-Like Bankruptcy Wait, I thought only the Republican Party was being torn asunder by a rift between the establishment middle and the fringe. That impression was nailed down, again, last week by the embarrassing fracture among House Republicans over funding for the Department of Homeland Security....

Back in March 2014 we forecast that it in the aftermath of the US State Department-sponsored coup in Kiev, it was only a matter of time before Ukraine (all of its sovereign gold having since "vaporized") succumbed to full blown hyperinflation and economic implosion. Less than a year later, precisely this outcome has finally played out, and as a result, the entire nation has finally entered its economic endgame, which has two conclusions: either it joins Greece in becoming a ward of Europe and the IMF (thank you Joe Q taxpayer), or it quietly fades away into insolvent "failed state"...

GRAND RAPIDS, MI -- Family Christian Stores, the nation's largest Christian bookstore and gift chain, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in hopes of restructuring its debt in the face of declining sales. The Grand Rapids-based chain said it does not expect to close any of its 266 stores in 36 states or layoff any of its 3,100 full-time and part-time employees. "We strive to serve God in all that we do and trust his guidance in all our decisions, especially this very important one," said President and CEO Chuck Bengochea in a news release. "We have carefully and prayerfully...

CEO: 'We have carefully and prayerfully considered every option.'Family Christian Stores (FCS) has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Yet the ministry assured customers yesterday that it "does not expect" to close any of its more than 250 stores or lay off any of its approximately 4,000 employees. “We strive to serve God in all that we do and trust His guidance in all our decisions, especially this very important one,” stated FCS president and CEO Chuck Bengochea. “We have carefully and prayerfully considered every option. This action allows us to stay in business and continue to serve our customers,...

For years, RadioShack — the retailer that helped bring personal computers to the masses — outlasted untold predictions that it would buckle in the face of bigger rivals and online competitors. But its clock has finally run out. RadioShack, a long-ailing 94-year-old electronics chain, filed for bankruptcy protection on Thursday after striking a deal to sell up to 2,400 of its stores to the wireless service provider Sprint and a hedge fund that is its biggest shareholder. The Chapter 11 filing, made in federal bankruptcy court in Delaware, took few unaware. RadioShack had not turned a profit since 2011, and...

Electronics retailer RadioShack Corp filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and said shareholder Standard General LP would buy 1,500 to 2,400 of its stores. RadioShack listed assets of $1.2 billion and liabilities of $1.39 billion in its bankruptcy petition in a Delaware court.

In naming an emergency manager for Atlantic City on Thursday, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie left the door open for the seaside gambling resort to file for bankruptcy if it can’t get its finances under control. The Republican governor and likely presidential candidate appointed a corporate turnaround specialist as the city’s emergency manager, and tabbed the man who led Detroit through its municipal bankruptcy as his assistant. Corporate finance consultant Kevin Lavin will have broad powers over Atlantic City’s finances and operations. Kevyn Orr, who helped lead Detroit through a financial crisis, will serve as special counsel to Lavin. Christie...